July was a relatively quiet month where we did a lot of playtesting of Cyber Pet Quest and preparation for GenCon, as well as wrangle the logistical beast that is shipping and fulfillment for Lunar Rush and Omicron Protocol - Critical Condition Expansion. We are now 2 days away from GenCon 2023 starting, so if you're headed to GenCon, PLEASE come by Booth 2932 to say hi to us and check out the games!
The last week has been surreal... And since we haven’t written a blog post in a while, I thought I'd post this here to share.
Preparing for DunDraCon, GAMA, and JoCo cruise haven’t left me with much free time but I managed to squeeze in a couple hours of painting. Without further ado, here’s Lucky!
The blog has taken a back seat since the end of the Kickstarter campaign. The holidays were busy and we had a lot of logistics to figure out as we finalized our manufacturing plan and got started producing OP. Exciting times! One of the exciting developments is that we produced our first prototypes of the alt sculpt Bolt and Lucky miniatures.
At long last we have all 12 of our first 2 faction models painted as well as I am able. I finished Lance and fixed a few odds & ends (Pai’s Buddha pendant, finally) with just enough time to spritz the models with a little Dull Coat and have it barely set for the photo shoot on Sunday. All that work paid off when we got to see how awesome our models look through the lens of Nik Pledger’s camera.
Finally a week of calm after 3 big demo events within a 10 day period. As many of you know, expecially those who follow us in our social media groups (@omicronprotocol on FB, Twitter, and Instagram), Brendan and I have been busy running between cons and demo events over the past 2 weekends. It has been tiring spending that much time in the airport (especially when a flight gets delayed for 3.5 hours!) and doing non-stop demos, but like always, it has been very rewarding.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Bernie and myself. Starting on the 9th we did LVO, a BackerKit playtest meetup during the week, and then OrcCon in LA This last weekend. During this week and a half we still met up to work on the game 3 nights, doing some major revisions on the rulebook (stay tuned, playtesters) and working through some difficult balancing issues. How, you ask, did I find time for our favorite Mountie? I’m not even sure, but I did find time - that’s what matters.
I had another very fun painting session on the Epic Duck Studios twitch stream on Sunday. I took some time to catch up on base coating during the week so I was able to get right into really defining volumes on the model. I’ve been focusing on improving my painting in a lot of areas, with special attention on creating greater contrast. With that in mind, I’m pretty happy with how the shadows on the horse and the red jacket are turning out.
Many of you have seen some preview art of a few members of the Red Dragons, or heard us talking about them. Well, we can finally officially announce them now that the art for all 6 starting characters are complete, thanks to our amazing artist Viktor Kolodiazhniy (and Tania Gomes for putting the “group photo” together).
I had a really fun time painting last Sunday on the Epic Duck Studios twitch stream. I must have been talking too much because halfway through the show I looked down and realized I had base coated 1/2 the horse, shaded the underside, and blended the brown and white of his hooves. I hadn’t even touched Lance himself by the end of the show! All this after discussing at the top of the show how I usually paint a model in the order it would get dressed: skin, undershirt, pants, jacket, etc…
Just a couple models left to go before we have 2 complete sets: Seeker and Lance. I am working as hard as I can on this second set because they have to be my best photogenic models ever. But I also have to get them done because we need photos sooner than later. We have a date with a photographer February 23rd and we are going to be at LVO the weekend of the 8th and Orccon the next week. That gives me next weekend and whatever time I can scrounge up during the week.
I mentioned last week that non-metallic metals are easier to learn for me on our models because there is very little metal to paint. If I’m painting a belt buckle and it looks wrong it’s a matter of a few seconds to start over and try something new. It takes a little longer for a rifle or a knee pad, but I find these are not too discouraging as well. This week I started on Flash, and Flash has the biggest piece of metal in the game so far - his drone.
It’s time for another entry of “Game Design Thoughts”!
This time, we’ll focus on the Animals faction, which we just revealed last week officially. As many have seen, we’ve started playtesting them again, after putting them away for a few months. Before we stopped testing them last time (September 2018 time frame), they were balanced against both the Peacekeepers and Survivalists. Since then, we’ve definitely made some changes to the game, namely to the CyMS, and we made the Peacekeepers’ range strength a lot higher over the last few months. So we thought, “Animals should be balanced, if not too weak now, against the PK.”. Boy were we wrong!
Painting our models has been a great way for me to start learning NMM. The near-future urban setting has dictated the style of the models, which means the metallic bits are limited to a few small parts of the model, as opposed to many miniature lines out there that are composed of suits of armor, swords and shields, etc, which can be very daunting when you’re not quite sure what you’re doing. I’ve taken a few less successful stabs at painting NMM where I just bit off more than I could chew.
